What can be harder than going from Home Brewing to starting your own brewery? Doing it in San Francisco! But that is exactly what Jamil Zainasheff has done as the founder of Heretic Brewing in Pittsburg, CA, which is actually about 25 miles east of San Francisco, but still within the greater San Francisco Metro region. My point is it can’t be cheap to start up a brewery in this neck of the woods.
Last week I enjoyed one of Jamil’s creations, Evil Cousin Ale. This is a Double or Imperial IPA and it boasts 100 IBUs and quite a bit of resinous hop flavor and aroma.
This beer poured a hazy golden color with a very piney nose. It was a very sticky and thick hops brew, but not at all unpleasant.
This is not a floral beer like some IPAs can be, but an aggressive, in your face kind of DIPA that pulls no punches and asks for no forgiveness.
This is the type of beer when I think of a beer that would satisfy a self described Hop Head. If you like your hops thick, bitter, and resinous this is the brew for you. Nothing floral or even very citrusy, this beer tastes like you are eating pine needles, but in a good way.
I matched this beer with an Arturo Fuente Cigar, and was in heaven. The hard pine flavor really accentuated the tobacco leaves and vice versa.
So dreams can become reality for home brewers. If you win competitions and get active in the brewing community you can make good things happen like Jamil did. And I for one am glad he is making his dreams a reality. It is a true win-win.
-Don
Beer & Whiskey Brothers 
I’m not a hophead, but I get in the mood for a “pine tree ground up in a glass” from time to time. This one sounds like it fits that bill.
This sounds great, hopefully they’ll stock it somewhere here in Denver. Don, do you know what the ABV is?
9.0 ABV.
Thanks! So if I find it, it’ll be a Friday or Saturday night beer 🙂
You could drink it on a weeknight if it was your only beer. 😉
Also, from what I understand, not particularly easy to extrapolate your home brew recipes to brewery size. So far, all of the Heretic brews I’ve had are rock-solid creations. Given his reputation for quality though, that was to be expected. Nice work Jamil! Of the three I’ve had, Shallow Grave is my fave. Great beer and a great beer story. 🙂
Good point Chad. It is a difficult thing to scale up home brew recipes for full scale production. They did a really nice job here.
I’ll be lookin’ for it Don!
You’ll like it when you are in the mood for hops!
Sounds tasty. It’d be really good if you linked to Heretic Brewing’s homepage in your post, if only to save us from RSI that occurred while googling them.
I looked for it while writing this post. I don’t think they have one yet.
A quick google search led me to: http://hereticbrewing.com/home
I don’t mean to seem a pedant, it’s just a little something that grinds my gears.
I will have to pick it up this weekend, can I expect to get punched in the face by the hops?
No, it’s more like a donkey punch to the back of the head. 😉
Yeah, for whatever reason our default browser is Bing, and it sucks. Whenever I really want to find something I have to specifically search google. I’ll have to fix that one of these days.